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The Monster Mash

Horror movies inspire in me the queasy compulsion to stare and cover my eyes simultaneously. In time for Halloween, Oxford is bringing out a book that provokes a similar sensation. Stephen T. Asma’s “On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears” is a comprehensive modern-day bestiary. It has the mythical and the mystical, the freaks who became circus sideshows and the hermaphrodites drowned by the Romans. It is uncomfortably fascinating to read about the famous Italian conjoined brothers, Lazarus and Baptista, the Russian dog-faced boy, whose hairy face makes him look impressively like Chewbacca, and the protoceratops, a beaked dinosaur whose skeleton, found in the mythical-sounding Dzungarian basin, looks strikingly like a griffin. A surprisingly benign-seeming behemoth makes a cameo visit from the King James, as does an apocalyptic beast with seven cat-heads. But it won’t do any good to hide from such phantoms under the covers: “On Monsters” reminds us, via the final chapters on Freud, psychopaths, and xenophobes, that the things to be truly feared are our inner monsters. As Montaigne said, “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.”